Johannes Junge Ruhland

Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies

Education

Ph.D. Stanford University
MA King's College London
BA University of Geneva

Research and Teaching Interests

Medieval French Literature, Manuscript Studies, Debate Literature, Historiography

Biography

I am a scholar of medieval literature in French, Occitan, Latin, and Franco-Italian. My focus is on manuscripts from ca. 1200 to ca. 1400 and in my work, I try to explore the implications of working with a “manuscript-first” approach on questions of historical narration, genre, narrative voice, and hermeneutics. 

My current research program is on manuscripts that present historical narratives, especially in prose. By looking at manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, the Grandes Chroniques de France, and the Bible historiale, I try to develop a better understanding of how the medium of the manuscript book enables readers to understand what history is and engage with historical narratives in ways that depend on the material presentation of texts. I am developing a book project based on this research. In parallel, I am also editing a volume of essays titled Making History with Manuscripts in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Contributors ask how manuscripts shape historical narratives and conceptions of history across several languages and periods and with diverse methodologies. Until these books come out, you will be able to read about this research in Medium Ævum, Mediaevalia, and various collections of essays.

I am also working on how manuscripts shape or transform scholarly notions of literary genres. Read about it in my newly published “The Practice of Debate in French Literature before Machaut” (French Studies), with a companion edition: “Bernier de Chartres’ Vraie Medecine d’amours and His Lady’s Response (Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 2609)” (Romania).

When I teach literature, I love to draw on topics that have long accompanied me, such as animality and human-animal relations, courtly love, social norms, gender and sexuality, debate and debating techniques, and literature as a form with which to think. I am also an advocate for making all teaching about skills, and I try to help students improve on writing and speaking while they learn about medieval texts and manuscripts. 

My PhD dissertation developed incongruence—the dissonance in theme, tone, or logic between two or more texts—as a heuristic to understand multi-text manuscripts from before 1350 that complements more traditional approaches focused on coherence and unity. I described multi-text manuscripts as “thought laboratories” which set up thought experiments through incongruence. I worked on compilations of romance, history, lyric, and treatises. You can read some early musings about incongruence in “The Challenge of Incongruence in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour” (Exemplaria) and more matured thoughts in my forthcoming article, “Fraught Histories,” in Mediaevalia. 

Before joining Notre Dame, I was a PhD candidate at Stanford University, where I was also the Assistant Director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies in 2022–2023. In Fall 2022, I held an appointment as lecturer in medieval French
literature at UC Berkeley.

I am available to supervise Honors and Master’s theses. Students interested in pursuing doctoral studies with me should consider applying to the Medieval Institute’s PhD program, where I am a Fellow.

Representative Publications

For a list of publications, please visit https://nd.academia.edu/JohannesJungeRuhland